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President Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to “find” votes to overturn the election results following his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, according to an audio recording of a phone call obtained by CNN and first reported by The Washington Post.
Here are the key things to know about the call:
What Trump said: In excerpts from the surprising one-hour phone call on Saturday, Trump lashed out at his fellow Republican for refusing to falsely claim he won the Georgia election and repeatedly touting unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. In one part, Trump said, “Look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state. The president also claimed during the call that votes in the state were scanned three times, a charge that Raffensperger rejected.
Who recorded the call: Officials in Raffensperger’s office recorded the call with Trump on Saturday, according to a source who was on the call and had direct knowledge of the conversation. Raffensperger told his advisers that he did not want the recording or transcript of the call released unless Trump attacked him or misrepresented the call, according to the source. Trump tweeted attacking Raffensperger Sunday morning. The New York Times first reported on who recorded the call and Raffensperger’s instructions on publishing the audio. The audio recording was reported by The Washington Post several hours after Trump said on Twitter that he had spoken to Raffensperger by phone in an attempt to convince him to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories about the November vote.
Raffensperger’s position: Georgia’s secretary of state, a Republican and a Trump supporter, has consistently rejected the president’s claims of alleged election fraud in Georgia. He has overseen three different counts of the vote and conducted several other reviews of the process. It recently commissioned the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to conduct an audit of the signature matching system in Cobb County that determined the system was 99.9% accurate and revealed no evidence of fraud.
The time of the call: The call represents the latest extraordinary effort by Trump to change the results of the race he lost after weeks of legal and political efforts by the president, his legal team and Republican allies to reverse free and fair elections. The president’s request comes just days before Congress meets to certify Biden’s victory, a traditionally ceremonial exercise on Capitol Hill that will look dramatically different this year as Republicans in both houses plan to oppose the vote recount of the Electoral College.
